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Après son Oscar pour le scénario de The Imitation Game, Graham Moore nous conte le formidable duel de deux inventeurs de génie qui ont transformé notre vie quotidienne. New York, 1888. Les lampadaires à gaz éclairent les rues de la ville, l'électricité en est à ses balbutiements. Celui qui parviendra à en contrôler la distribution sait déjà qu'il gagnera une fortune considérable et sa place dans l'histoire. Deux hommes s'affrontent pour emporter la mise : Thomas Edison et George Westinghouse. Tous les coups sont permis. Lorsqu'un jeune avocat, Paul Cravath, aidé par le légendaire Nikola Tesla, se mêle à ce combat homérique, il va bientôt se rendre compte qu'autour de lui toutes les apparences sont trompeuses et que chacun a des intentions cachées. À la façon d'Erik Larson, Graham Moore s'est appuyé sur des documents historiques peu connus pour nous livrer un récit d'une incroyable efficacité, qui se lit comme un thriller, tout en offrant une profondeur passionnante à ces personnages qui ont façonné notre modernité. Une formidable histoire où l'on constatera que la réalité dépasse toujours la fiction. " Hypnotique, brillant, Les Derniers Jours de l'émerveillement est un triomphe. Réaliste et fouillé, captivant de bout en bout, ce roman va vous mettre en ébullition ! " Gillian Flynn " Quand vous aurez fini votre lecture, vous aurez un mal fou à revenir au monde contemporain ! " Erik Larson " Un modèle absolu de fiction historique. " The Washington Post… (plus d'informations)
Quand science, invention, finances et droits se mélangent dans une bataille féroce qui a déterminé beaucoup de ce qui détermine notre vie électrique actuelle, quand des rappels historiques éclairent sur les batailles actuelles autour des innovations, des inventeurs (ou prétendus tels) et de leurs conséquences et inconséquence. Bien plus qu'un bon roman. ( )
The author of The Sherlockian (2010) presents another twisty historical novel set at the end of the gaslight era. This time the story takes place in a New York City perched on the very precipice of electricity. The book's central focus is on American ingenuity as the basis for commercial success and the so-called war of currents waged between ThomasEdison, George Westinghouse, and NikolaTesla over the creation of the lightbulb. Paul Cravath, the brilliant but inexperienced lawyer hired by Westinghouse to countersue the pugnacious Edison for copyright infringement, unscrupulous behavior, and even violence, provides a first-person perspective. Legal battles and the rancor between scientists drive the pace, while a curious romance unmasks yet another underhanded charade. Woven into this complex drama is a philosophical question about invention: Who is the inventor: the one with the idea, the one who makes a working model, or the one to obtain the patent? Who really did invent the lightbulb?
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work. —Thomas Edison
People don't know what they want until you show it to them. —Steve Jobs
Don't you understand that Steve doesn't know anything about technology? He's just a super salesman.... He doesn't know anything about engineering, and 99 percent of what he says and thinks is wrong. —Bill Gates
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. —Karl Popper
Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive. —Friedrich Nietzsche
In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone. —Bill Gates
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. —Steve Jobs
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. —Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. —Alexander Graham Bell
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
FOR MY GRANDFATHER, DR. CHARLIE STEINER, who first taught me to revere science on a trip to Bell Laboratories when I was nine years old. He set an example of intelligence, kindness, and decency to which I aspire every day.
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
On the day that he would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn alive in the sky above Broadway.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
The Western Union man was attempting to untangle the two sets of wires. He looked like a child flummoxed by enormous shoelaces.
Paul felt not only that the lights were new, but that he was. A spark of the filament, and he had been revealed as something he never thought he might be.
None of these early iterations were fit for the home—no wife in America would sanction the installation of a lamp that was confusing to use, expensive to repair, and more likely than not to set the drapes on fire.
That spring, the light-bulb lawsuits descended like locusts upon the land.
"It's one thing to design something, kid. Thomas Edison designs all manner of junk. It's another thing entirely to design something that can be practically built. A thing that will work. That is what a real inventor does. He designs manufacturable devices."
He had no idea what he was to make of this mysterious Mr. Tesla. But any enemy of Edison's was bound to be a friend of Westinghouse's.
While Paul hoped that Westinghouse would not get impenetrably technical, any explanation he provided would still be more comprehensible than the buckshot of white chalk lines Tesla continued to spread across the blackboard.
Marguerite strained what looked to be every muscle upon her face to keep a smile in place.
Westinghouse seemed to think of himself as the father of a large clan of eager children; he would famously grace them with presents at holidays, and had in fact been the first employer in America to reduce his employees' workweek to six days.
Westinghouse found himself impotent in the face of Tesla's willful insubordination for the simple reason that he needed Tesla, while Tesla only found Westinghouse to be vaguely useful.
That attorneys labored with pens rather than shovels did not dignify their position in the eyes of Rockefellers and Morgans and Roosevelts. It only made their attempts at society life all the more quaint.
She was among the smallest women Paul had ever seen, but fit a double-sized personality into a squat bullet of a frame. She was a rifle shell. Hardened and cool, packed and loaded, ever ready to explode. How this mother had bred this daughter was a question for Mr. Darwin.
That she felt no need to prove anything to him, while he felt such desire to prove much to her, only accentuated the continent of social distance between them.
Even the alcohol in this place was the color of money.
"Nobody ever won a game they didn't play."
"You should share these devices with the world. Tell people what you're working on. Tell someone." ¶ "Am I not telling you, Mr. Paul Cravath?" ¶ "You are. But I'm not a scientist." ¶ "Perhaps that is the very reason I can be telling you," said Tesla with a smile. "You could not steal my ideas even if you wanted to." ¶ "I suppose that counts as trust in our business," said Paul.
Serrell raised an eyebrow. He was the sort of man who knew the communicative value of a carefully raised eyebrow.
To think of the scenes that took place nightly between those chairs. The backstabbing, the social climbing, the bitter family feuds played out at every intermission. The drama among the audience was famously more intense than what was performed upon the stage. Empty in the quiet morning, the house seemed pregnant with the promise of the night's warfare.
It occurred to Paul that he had met two very different Agnes Huntingtons, between her mother's house and the Players' Club. Would he find a third at the Metropolitan Opera?
Strange how this unaccountable man found himself so often in the lap of luxury.
"You don't trust me?" said Agnes. ¶ "I trust you a little," said Paul. "You're asking me to trust you a lot."
"Well, I'll tell you an awful secret about the opera," said Agnes as she rang the bell from a stagehand. "It's the same show every night."
The winter wind slapped hard against the thick windows, providing a low accompaniment to their quiet conversation.
"You're hallucinating, Nikola," said Paul. ¶ "No," replied Tesla with the first smile that Paul had seen on his face in a long time. "I'm inventing."
Paul brought mounds of paper into his firm's offices and stared at them as an experienced climber might regard the distant cliffs of Everest. What man could accomplish the trek alone?
Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness. Eli Whitney and Alexander Graham Bell had each made his name by inventing one brilliant thing. Edison had formed a laboratory that had invented a system of invention.
Though Columbia was one of the oldest universities in the country, it still had its baby fat.
The notables of New York bounced against one another like the fizzy bubbles in the champagne flutes.
Money was a far more predictable motivator than legacy, or fame, or love, or whatever else might rouse a man from his bedsheets. An artist—or an inventor—was a far more dangerous partner than a businessman. The latter's betrayal could be planned for, even depended upon.
Paul felt suddenly naked, his thoughts and plans and seemingly clever moves over the past years now revealed to be but a pathetic sham. Edison had been outplaying them from the very start.
"Scientists. You ask one hundred of them a simple question, you get one hundred different answers. They're a necessary annoyance in the industrial business, I suppose."
"Poor people all think they deserve to be rich," he continued. "Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not." ¶ Morgan spoke as if they were the same class of men. As if Morgan were Paul's own reflection in a darkened mirror.
Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn’t mean he’ll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.
If one has never suffered for want of a thing, one has no conception of the trade-offs required for getting it.
One doesn’t lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.
“Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”
“The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you’re ever given a thing.”
“‘General Electric.’ It has a rather nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
He turned away, descending the stairwell into the darkening shadow of a country that was just becoming America.
Après son Oscar pour le scénario de The Imitation Game, Graham Moore nous conte le formidable duel de deux inventeurs de génie qui ont transformé notre vie quotidienne. New York, 1888. Les lampadaires à gaz éclairent les rues de la ville, l'électricité en est à ses balbutiements. Celui qui parviendra à en contrôler la distribution sait déjà qu'il gagnera une fortune considérable et sa place dans l'histoire. Deux hommes s'affrontent pour emporter la mise : Thomas Edison et George Westinghouse. Tous les coups sont permis. Lorsqu'un jeune avocat, Paul Cravath, aidé par le légendaire Nikola Tesla, se mêle à ce combat homérique, il va bientôt se rendre compte qu'autour de lui toutes les apparences sont trompeuses et que chacun a des intentions cachées. À la façon d'Erik Larson, Graham Moore s'est appuyé sur des documents historiques peu connus pour nous livrer un récit d'une incroyable efficacité, qui se lit comme un thriller, tout en offrant une profondeur passionnante à ces personnages qui ont façonné notre modernité. Une formidable histoire où l'on constatera que la réalité dépasse toujours la fiction. " Hypnotique, brillant, Les Derniers Jours de l'émerveillement est un triomphe. Réaliste et fouillé, captivant de bout en bout, ce roman va vous mettre en ébullition ! " Gillian Flynn " Quand vous aurez fini votre lecture, vous aurez un mal fou à revenir au monde contemporain ! " Erik Larson " Un modèle absolu de fiction historique. " The Washington Post
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